Despite rapid development of the Middle East’s urban landscape resulting from the influx of Arab Gulf money and investments, the Arab masses became increasingly disenchanted with the so-called macroeconomic success of the region that was often garnered from real estate growth and was non-inclusive. Using the argument of “built environments” and based on a case study of Jordan and primary data collected from Jordan using national surveys, focus groups, and personal interviews with officials and policy-makers, this paper will examine how this neoliberal urban change had shaped city residents’ perceptions that lead to enhanced feelings of social exclusion and frustration. It argues that urban developments have precipitated social exclusion and frustration and has been often overlooked in seeing this as a background to events leading to Arab revolts. With the influx of billions of dollars in direct foreign investments (FDI) coming from oil-rich Arab Gulf states with large capital surpluses, several Middle Eastern cities have become replete with high-rise towers and mega-development projects. Yet although Middle Eastern governments and elites publicize and aspire to attain this so called “modernization” of their countries, many of Arab people remained disconnected from these rapid attempts at urban development. In Jordan alone, there have been nearly 20 real estate developers from the Gulf who have initiated over 80 real estate projects throughout the small kingdom in the mid-2000's. Many of these projects are high-rise mixed-use towers that combine retail outlets, offices, and residential condominiums in addition to Western-inspired residential villas, grandiose tourist resorts and entertainment complexes. This ‘Dubaization’ of the Middle East has become a common policy aspiration or attempted replication throughout the Middle East. This article is in keeping with the view of scholars that have argued that the Arab revolts were an attempt to reclaim public places as a result of a profound sense of social exclusion and alienation felt by the Arab masses (Aly, 2011; Tripp, 2012). Despite common misperceptions that the Arab revolts did not affect Jordan, the revolutions sweeping the Middle East continue to impact this tiny kingdom. Demonstrations, political protests, boycotts, labour protests, strikes and other non-violent actions have been noted throughout the country (Adely, 2012; Tobin, 2012; Lynch, 2012).

The property regime that is professed in Jordanian laws, regulations and by land registration institutions is very different from the actually existing property regimes. Azraq, a small village in the North-eastern desert of Jordan where farmers and land speculators are involved at a daily basis in illegal grabs of significant pieces of state land, provides but one of the many examples hereof. To understand this widespread difference, it is important to approach the concept of property as relationally constructed: Property is a relation between people about things. In Jordan (as in many other countries) this relation has come to be increasingly regulated by the state during the past century. Consequently, the relation between the state and its citizens forms a constitutive element in the construction of a particular property regime. Demands for a different property regime thus necessarily need to address this relation. As one can see in Azraq, these demands are often expressed either through direct and violent confrontations between the state and interest groups, or through lobbying. However, these are far from the only methods farmers use to re-design the formal property regime. This paper looks at less visible and more subtle ways of contestation that manifest themselves in the imagining and acting upon a different (relation to the) state altogether - One that fits the farmers’ aspired property regime. Based on several months of ethnographic research in Azraq, the paper starts with a focus on the kind of property relations that exists within Azraq and the ways in which proprietorial practices of farmers and other interest groups seem, at first sight, to undo the state. However, an anthropological analysis of these possessive practices shows that these do not so much negate the state as try to re-construct it into one that will lend legitimacy to the property regimes of their desires. This paper shows how they do so through particular quotidian practices that play on (and with) temporal and spatial properties that are characteristic of (and inherent in) state practices.

This paper explores the conceptual puzzles introduced by increased financial openness in contemporary authoritarian regimes, specifically those of the Middle East. It presents theories on the effects of financial flows on elite coalition politics. Since the 1970s cross-national financial flows grew exponentially worldwide. While such increases in international transactions have affected domestic politics in virtually every country, how this occurred has not always been obvious. Indeed, the sheer volume of literature on this topic makes it easy to overlook an important point: Very little of it addresses the effects of international financial integration on authoritarian regimes. In light of the gap between real world phenomena and academic investigation, this paper supplements existing data with case study research on Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt to examine the following questions: How do linkages with global markets affect the sectors, factors, or cleavages that comprise political interaction among ruling elites in an authoritarian regime? What role does international economic integration play in structuring regime-opposition contention? And how, ultimately, is the longevity and solidity of authoritarian governance challenged by market liberalization? In addressing such questions, I seek to account for how economic reforms leading to increased international economic openness have affected elite-level contestation in the MENA region and in authoritarian regimes in general.

There may be no more stark expression of colonial conquest than the requisition of land. In Algeria, the historical processes by which French colonizers appropriated land from Muslim locals in order to attract and sustain the settler population is well documented. Perhaps most famously, the 1873 Warnier Act helped dismantle the system of pious endowments (waqf/habous) and established a French private property regime while also undercutting the main source of revenue to the zawiya (religious “lodges” of sufi brotherhoods). To justify this legislation, French legal Orientalists set out to prove that not only were awqaf (pl.) outside the purview of Muslim “personal status” law (theoretically protected from French interference) but even, they argued, un-Islamic and essentially illegal (Powers 1989). The historiography on colonial Algeria largely accepts the self-evidence of “personal status” as a category governed by religious authority and defined in opposition to a sphere of state authority that oversaw social and criminal matters. Yet, as this paper shows, the actual limits of “personal status” law were an enduring source of uncertainty for French jurists and administrators, and its boundaries were routinely negotiated and contested by Muslim Algerian subjects. No-where is the drama of this negotiation better demonstrated than in the colonial courtroom. Using records from personal status file cases in Algerian municipal archives, supplemented with the public record of colonial jurisprudence and statutes, this study reveals how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Algerians, and particularly Algerian women, frequented colonial courts of Muslim law to protect their property rights. Even as French colonial reformers put their energies into regulating personal status matters concerning Muslim women (particularly divorce, polygamy, and consent in marriage) they drafted land dispossession laws that had a disproportionally egregious effect on these same women. Compounding this irony, as these records show, by far the most prevalent reason Algerian women went to court was to challenge their male relatives, in-laws, ex-husbands, and even children in order to protect the inheritance rights that Islamic law afforded them. This paper explores the strategies they deployed in this effort, most prominently pre-emption (shufaa). This research contributes to various historiographies by uncovering for the first time a key site of Algerian women’s encounter with the colonial state. It also uses social history methodologies to personalize and better understand the effects of the colonial private property regime.

Increased globalization over the last two decades has led to strong growth in international business activity and international financial integration. This phenomenon covers a wide array of economic activities, including international trade, and international financial shocks and disturbances. The purpose of this work is to examine the effects of external shocks on financial integration in the Arab Maghreb countries using multivariate threshold VAR estimation with data from 1990 to 2012. Results find that external shocks affect negatively Maghreb countries and impede the implementation of financial integration project. However, this vulnerability to shocks can reduce if these economies intensify financial and commercial transactions between them.